At the current time, the term “HDR imaging” is used for photography-based 3D rendering and for capturing HDR 32 bit images. We will here only focus on the latter. Such HDR-32 bit (sometimes 16 bit) images are created using a tripod and a camera that is operated in “bracketing” mode, so that a series of 2 to 15 images of different exposures is recorded. These images are merged in memory to one single 32 bit image, which then has a very high dynamic range. However, such a 32 bit image can not be displayed conveniently on any monitor or printer (yet). Therefore, a so-called “tone mapping” function is required to convert 32 bit images into an adapted, displayable 8 bit or 16 bit file.
Some of such tone mappings are given in Michael Ashikhmin, “A Tone Mapping Algorithm for High Contrast Images,” in 13th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering. Eurographics, 2002, [Ash02]; Gregory Ward Larson, Holy Rushmeier, Christine Piatko, “A visibility matching tone reproduction operator for high dynamic range scenes,” in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 1997 [Ward97]; Erik Reinhard, Michael Stark, Peter Shirley, James Ferwerda, “Photographic Tone Reproduction for Digital Images,” in Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2002, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series. ACM Press/ACM SIGGRAPH, July 2002 [Rein02]. It should be said that the over two decades old “retinex” routine can also be considered the “mother” of all tone mappings (although not specifically designed for HDR imaging), which can be represented in simplified form as:J=qI/(i*g)where g is a convolution kernel function, such as a Gaussian bell curve, q is any factor such as 128.0, and “*” represents 2D signal convolution. In other words: Jxy is bright if Ixy is bright compared to the adjacent pixels within an area of influence defined by g.
This tone-mapping is currently at the state of the art poorly integrated into the workflow. What is needed is a method to enhance the HDR workflow, enhance the speed and ease of tone mapping, while enhancing the results and the convenience of editing for the user. Preferably, this would allow for fast previews of tone-maps, and allow editing of the image before the tone-map is applied. The invention disclosed herein will be called “DRE”, which stands for Dynamic Range Editing.